Electrical and Computer Engineering

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Student Interests

January 24, 2012

In the News: Build18 Projects

ECE students made headlines across the country last week when more than 120 tinkerers and gadgeters participated in the department's Build18 initiative, a week of building and speed hacking for students, by students. Now in its third year, the engineering festival encourages groups of students to innovate and create solutions to problems they choose themselves, free from the pressure of tests, exams and formal project reviews. ECE students run the event, coordinating everything from the project applications to finding corporate sponsors. The department kicks in lab space, equipment and conference rooms. The result? A weeklong hackfest that gives students a chance to find their inner entrepreneurs. (Read more.)

January 18, 2012

ECE Students Host Third Annual Build18 Festival

Succeeding in innovation and invention, of course, means identifying the customers' needs and satisfying them. Not everything works the first time. But whether 120 Carnegie Mellon engineering students are being playful with a new mind-controlled toy car or deadly earnest in promoting bicycle safety, their energy and ingenuity will be on display from 3 to 5 p.m., Jan. 20 in Hamerschlag Hall at the third annual Build18 Project Showcase. (Read more.)

November 30, 2011

ECE, CS Students Win Global Cybersecurity Contests

A team of ECE and computer science students led by ECE Assistant Professor David Brumley are using their competitive skills to rack up global victories as members of CMU's Capture the Flag team. Capture the Flag (CTF) is a computer security war game in which each participating team or individual competes to find a key source of information by solving a litany of challenges. Since late October, the CMU CTF team has won two prestigious contests. On Oct. 24, they won the SecuInside CTF contest in South Korea, winning $30,000. In early November, they entered two teams at the Polytechnic Institute of New York (NYU-Poly) CSAW contest and took first and second place, netting another $1,750. (Read more.)

October 6, 2011

ECE Student Work Receives Best Paper Award

A paper authored by ECE Ph.D. students Gokce Keskin and Jonathan Proesel, along with Tanoto Professor of ECE Larry Pileggi, earned the Best Student Paper Award at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) for 2010. The 2011 CICC conference, held recently in San Jose, Calif., honored the winners from the previous year. Their paper, "Statistical Modeling and Post Manufacturing Configuration for Scaled Analog CMOS," presents a novel statistical element selection (SES) method to address the mismatch issues for scaled analog circuits. Keskin, who recently graduated, accepted the award at the 2011 conference's keynote session. (Read more.)

August 9, 2011

Cvijic Earns Award at NAPS

ECE Ph.D. student Sanja Cvijic won second prize for Best Paper and Presentation at the North American Power Symposium (NAPS2011) in Boston earlier this month. The paper, co-authored with thesis advisor and ECE and EPP Professor Marija Ilic, is entitled "On Limits to Graph — Theoretic Approaches in Electric Power Systems," and concerns fundamental differences between transportation and electric circuit networks that make it difficult to directly draw on the rich literature in operations research. The paper proposes a sequence of unique transformations that map a physical meshed network into a non-physical, tree-structured network. Optimization is accomplished using well-established methods for transportation networks in this nonphysical network, and the results are uniquely mapped back to the physical network. (Read more.)